Slow cooking and smoking of many food items including wood resin cooking is rapidly becoming a revived art, leading to the necessity for more versatile and efficient cooking apparatuses of this type. The art in general has been stagnant in recent times, and only relatively crude traditional systems are available.
Thus, it is the main object of the invention to provide an improved apparatus for slow wood resin cooking which greatly enhances the utility and versatility of the system and renders it possible to achieve comparative highly refined control over the cooking and smoking of a variety of foods which require different degrees and different times of cooking and smoking for the most beneficial results. In short, the present invention seeks to eliminate "guesswork" and to greatly refine the control in a slow cooking apparatus for various meats, such as ham, bacon, fish and many other food items. The invention involves both accuracy and consistency in slow cooking and allows the operator to program a given set of conditions into the cooking apparatus, as will appear during the course of the following description.
Some fairly recent developments in the art constitute a background for the present invention including U.S. Pat. No. 3,974,760 on which the present invention is an improvement, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,699,876 and 3,841,211.